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Punk Amazon pheasant is a European emigrant

THE Amazon’s mystery bird hails from Europe. Today, hoatzins live only in South America, but the oldest known fossil of these odd birds reveals they once roamed France.

The hoatzin (pronounced “wot-seen”) is unique in the bird kingdom. Young hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) have claws on their wings, like their dinosaur ancestors, which they use to climb trees. They also have punk-style feathers on their heads and ferment their food in a foregut like that of cows, giving them a cow-like stink. The heavy foregut means hoatzins can only fly a few hundred metres.

For many years palaeontologists thought these birds evolved in South America. Now Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, has found the oldest hoatzin fossil, from 34 million years ago, and it lived in what is now France. The bird, Protoazin parisiensis, had lain unnoticed in museums for decades (Naturwissenschaften, doi.org/rch).

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There are also African hoatzin fossils, so Mayr thinks they evolved in the Old World. One line spread to America and the rest died out in Europe and Africa. That means modern hoatzins are a relict of a widespread group.

It is unclear how such poor flyers crossed the Atlantic. The French fossil is similar to modern hoatzins, suggesting a northern route. But North America has no hoatzin fossils. Instead, Mayr says they may have floated from Africa to South America on a raft of vegetation.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Punk Amazon bird is an ancient European emigrant”